Imposter Syndrome and YOU - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

over here that should be Instagram good to go I just like making sure the YouTube feed is working before I get too far ahead of myself and uh we'll get started in just a second so one more little refresh my mic is hopefully in good shape this week it's been been a long time coming um I've had a lot of mic issues and uh not been happy about that just doing a quick check it looks like LinkedIn chat is not working so I'll be trying to watch LinkedIn specifically in the comments um yeah I don't know why this happens but I'm using restream to kind of monitor a few different platforms and I can see that linkedin's not coming through um so anyway I have it up on one of my uh portions of this 48 in monitor it's it's in front of me so it's there but okay uh I think we're going on everything so today we I'm going to be talking about impostor syndrome so that's the name of the topic today and I think a lot of people have heard about impostor syndrome um especially in software engineering right we talk about impostor syndrome a lot and I think that what I found interesting as of late is I see more people having comments about what impostor syndrome is some people saying impostor syndrome isn't a real thing so I want to kind of get into all these details um I've written about impostor syndrome before I've made videos about impostor syndrome before I mentioned on last week's stream that this past week that went by I reinterviewed one of my former interns back at Magnet forensics who is um you know I someone I look up to for impostor syndrome we kind of sent her out to a women in Tech conference and she came back to to teach about impostor syndrome so uh she's awesome she knows all about it um hello Maria good to see you thanks for joining uh yeah so we're going to talk about impostor syndrome and I did write about it in my last newsletter um you know so if you like this kind of stuff I do have a newsletter that I put out weekly it's totally free so if you don't like that kind of stuff that's cool too because you can join me on these live streams but I also got some questions that were submitted to me ahead of time which is awesome because when you have an audience that's kind of in different places in the world like I know there's folks from the UK and there's people from India like it's there's going to be interesting times for people to be able to try and get online you know join something like this so um you know thanks for sending questions ahead of time I do appreciate that and I wanted to also call out that I am watching the chat I do want to make sure that I can answer your questions um Maria being on LinkedIn has proven that I'm able to see the stuff from LinkedIn if I watch LinkedIn so that's good um but yeah uh please do ask stuff as I as I'm kind of blabbing along here and I'm happy to answer uh even if it's not related to impostor syndrome right I I like doing these live streams for all of you so hopefully the topic is of interest but if you kind of want to shift gears and you have questions about other stuff please just let me know I'm happy to kind of chat through that and and see where things go okay so with that said imposter syndrome I actually want to kind of start with the questions I received because they were some really good ones and they technically I just reorganize them and they kind of flow in the same uh direction that the the newsletter article I wrote so I figured I might as well just uh dive into these because it's pretty cool okay so let's I think start with a working definition of imposter syndrome right because like I said some people have probably heard about this other people maybe not um there's going to be people that watch this that are going through impostor syndrome and they don't even know that it's a thing and so this might be might be kind of helpful where you're like oh crap like that's why I feel this way um and like I kind of said at the beginning it's it's really common in software engineering but it's not something unique to software Engineers it's not like impostor syndrome is like you know you catch catch a disease or something for being a software engineer it's nothing like that but uh it is very prevalent in software engineering and we'll kind of talk a little bit more about maybe why that's the case as we as we go through this chat right so how would the question that I had was how would you describe impostor syndrome and it's a two-part question but I'll start with that so how would you describe impostor syndrome and when you look up impostor syndrome it is basically the feeling that you are not adequate despite the fact that you have the skills and experience uh outward that prove otherwise and I think that it's important to get this definition clear because when you see people talking about impostor syndrome like this I again this is according to the internet maybe there's other people that have different definitions and whatever we haven't really aligned on a good one but this is the working definition that I use and there's an important part in this definition that I want to stress because some of the things that I've heard recently is you know something along the lines of impostor syndrome is not a real thing and people that feel you know air quotes impostor syndrome are technically imposters themselves and they end up saying like yeah these people are really the imposters because they don't have the skills and the reason that I want to make sure we have this clear working definition from the beginning and I will try to reiterate this because as the stream goes on people do end up joining it so if you're watching this recorded and you're like Nick why the heck are you saying this over and over that's why um but the important part from the definition is that you do actually have the skills this is important impostor syndrome is not hey I don't have the skills and now I feel like an impostor because yeah that I mean that would be an impostor by definition right if you are faking it and you don't have skills then you are an impostor but that's not what impostor syndrome is impostor syndrome is when you do have the skills and experiences that warrant you being in the position that you're in yet you don't feel like that's the case okay so um I think that's an important thing just reading Maria's comment here we all suffer uh from it every career stage because we care uh yeah we care about our teams we care about our customers yeah and sorry I'm kind of looking around my camera and stuff just cuz maybe this is not in a great spot I'm going to move this around so I don't need to to stare at my own face here as I'm kind of chatting through stuff give me one sec then I can watch the LinkedIn chat but unfortunately the LinkedIn chat's not going to like you can see on the video feed it's not going there so I apologize I'll try to read out the comments I see and uh I think there's a little more in yeah we care about our reputations as well yeah so impostor syndrome we do care about things right so impostor syndrome stems from or sorry is is the fact that we do not feel we have the skills or we don't deserve to be in the spot that we're in despite having these skills okay so that's that's important to note the second part of this question was and do you think there are people who are more impacted by this than others and I think the answer is yes but it's going to take a little bit of kind of like navigating this topic to see why that might be the case um and I you know I'll preface like I'm I'm not an expert I'm not a professional I haven't studied psychology I haven't done tons of research on this this is from lived experiences over the past you know uh 12 plus years after being you know graduated from University being in the industry managing teams for those 12 years as well so this is coming up from lived experiences and and things like that right so my own my own call it research and own own reading and stuff on top of that but certainly you know I don't have formal education in this it's not something I've I've studied specifically but are there people who are more impacted this than oh my goodness are there people who are more impacted by this than others I think the answer is yes and I think that a lot of impostor syndrome can boil down to some self-esteem challenges some self-confidence and self-worth challenges right so people that already are Maybe be a little bit more prone to this type of thing I think we feel impostor syndrome more I don't think that they're the exact same thing but I think that those types of things uh make you more prone to impostor syndrome um and I want to call out too because when I was writing this article I didn't realize this but I I kind of want to call it out in the beginning here that and I don't know if it has an official name I'm going to call it like um it's not called comparison syndrome but uh it was basically the idea that impostor syndrome is technically separate from this other thing that's like uh constant comparisons to others there's a bunch of articles that try to make this claim um and like I said I'm not a professional I'm not a psychologist I don't know um fundamentally the root of these things but what I did see was that even for people saying like hey they're not the same thing they were also saying basically like they almost go hand in hand anyway but so it's very common that you have both of these things so for the purpose of discussion here I don't want to get too nuanced about like this is a hyp specific critical definition I'd rather just talk about you're probably going through both these things anyway so we might as well just talk about them together so are there people that are more impacted yes I think uh you know self-esteem self-confidence those types of things and and being in environments where there's more comparison going on so this is going to kind of come out in the video that I'll release where I interviewed uh my former intern Julia and she was really you know kind of driving this point home that when you're in positions where comparisons can be made and there's a lot of comparisons going on so you're comparing yourself to those around you right um you really can be more impacted by impostor syndrome and then I'm kind of chaining some of these questions together so I'm going to jump a little bit around here and kind of come back to this but the the next question was specifically within software engineering world do you think Juniors experience it more than seniors um do you feel that it's lessened or worsened with experience or is it just change in terms of how it presents so a bunch of stuff going on with this question I think it's great um so let's talk about like software engineers in particular right so we're thinking about impostor syndrome kind of saying yeah like it can stem from having you know uh self-confidence issues things like that you're starting to do comparisons so let's think about people that are going into software engineering roles right I'm going to generalize a lot here so if this doesn't like resonate with you if you feel like hey like that doesn't describe my journey that's completely different I get it I can't possibly you know give one you know madeup experience is going to represent everyone so I do apologize if you feel like this doesn't resonate with you but um from the experiences I've had working with Engineers especially ones that experience impostor syndrome I think that hopefully this feels representative but let kind of let's start from the beginning right so because I want to be able to answer do juniors feel it more than seniors right so you are an aspiring software engineer in order to get into software engineering you need to have a lot of technical skills and this is something we all know software engineering is very technical and that means that you have to put a lot of effort into heing up in these technical Fields you know based on the programming language you're working with or languages the text stack or text Stacks uh you know your algorithms and data structures doing all your lead code grinding there's all this stuff to build up technical skills right so software engineering is very much like a knowledge-based field right there's a lot of very very smart people and I think this is an important part to think about when we're talking about imposter syndrome with software Engineers there's lots of brilliant people in software engineering so you starting out you're like okay I know I got a skill up because I'm going to be working with lots of smart people okay so you start this journey and you know if you think whether you're going through a boot camp you're selftaught or you're going to University like you are going to start finding yourself around other very smart people and from the beginning you will start doing comparisons right so you will start to say hey like I'm learning how to program in this and you'll go watch tutorial as an example you go watch your favorite YouTuber and you're like wow how do they know all this stuff like I wish I wish I could know all of that right you're immediately from the beginning starting to do comparisons I do not know these things this person knows so much wow that's fascinating right and we can as we're acquiring knowledge and practicing these things we constantly do these comparisons right take um and one of the questions on this list is about um if I've experienced imposter syndrome I'm going to try to hold off on I'm going to go through a huge list of impostor syndrome things that I felt in my career so I want to hold off on those for my personal experiences until later but let's take someone that's going through school right they're taking formal education route this could apply to a boot camp as well right so imagine you're in your boot camp or you're with other software engineers in school and you know you're going through classes and stuff and you got someone in your class or multiple people in your class and you're like wow like these people are so good at this like why is it they can just get these Concepts so quick right again you start to do these comparisons and a lot of the time when we're doing these comparisons what ends up happening is that we're hyperfocused on the things that people are really good at okay so it's like statistically not likely that everyone else around you is really good at everything what's probably happening is that people around you are going to be very good at particular things that you happen to be noticing and as a result you might look you know person a and you're like wow they are so good at debugging things they're they're amazing at it I can't believe how good they are I wish I could be that good so immediately you are scored below them so you know that doesn't feel so good now you look at this other person wow they they really get data structures it's so incredible how they can do that wish I could be that good okay you're scored below them but like you're doing a very specific comparison to these other individuals and you keep as you do this you keep finding all the good things about other people that are better than you and as a result you end up being like at the bottom of the totem pole because you've cherry-picked the expertise of all the people around you so suddenly like yeah you're at the bottom of the totem pole because of course when you cherry-pick everyone's you know superpowers you're not going to have them all that's part of it just reading the the comment here from Maria and there's so many new things coming up in Tech constantly it might not be easy to be on top of everything yeah it's it's basically even if we stopped having new things right so Maria is absolutely right but even if we stopped having new things so someone snaps her fingers no no more new technology you're still not going to catch up on everything that's out there right now like it's just it's impossible to be an expert in all of it okay so we start doing these comparisons early right now we're going to have to go through the interview process we're trying to land our job you're getting grilled on stuff and you know people are testing your knowledge right like they're testing to see if you're good enough and you might you know you might have done all the practice you might feel confident that's good right so some people will even feel like as they're going through interviews they might be going man like am I really cut out for this cuz that's the feeling when you have impostor syndrome you start to go like am I am I good enough right and the reality is you know depending on the person we have to assume based on the definition here that you have acquired the skills right so this is part of what we need to assume in this conversation so yeah you might have been you know grinding lead code for your interviews you might have been you know actually building software applications and language and uh text stack that you're interested in awesome so you might be genuinely acquiring these skills and again we're taking the sort of Junior software engineering kind of mindset here and you know you're starting to feel this even during your interviews and let's say you go through interviews and you Ace all of your interviews now you have multiple offers great right that can feel like okay like deep breath okay we're we're making progress here you accept an offer and you start working at a company what happens then now you're at this company you've done it you know you've been validated because you've been hired you've demonstrated your skills and or experience right you're you're good you have a company that's told you we think that you're awesome enough to be here with us great and then you start to work and you start to do the comparisons again you start getting your first assignments and you start going like you you know the pressure mounts like okay now I have to perform I have to do this but all these other people on the team are so good you're not good right that's how you feel like I'm not good at this and then you start trying to make progress and it's you know you might be getting stuck on a couple things which I mean expect it's going to happen you're brand new right you should be likely making mistakes when you're getting started it's okay but you start to kind of get tested this way and you're like oh crap like like am I cut out for this but the reality is you have the experiences you have the skills the company vetted you the people interviewing vetted you to say yeah we we think this this person's good to go right and here you are going I don't know I don't know if I'm good enough so I think it's very prevalent with Juniors very but there's something extra fascinating about impostor syndrome and it is the thing thing where like you know impostor syndrome is not permanent but impostor syndrome does keep coming up so you might kind of get over this hump where you're like okay like and I personally I think a lot of it comes down to building up self-confidence self-esteem selfworth that takes time so say you get through this hump of feeling this way now all of a sudden you know you're becoming more senior you start getting p into new situations and it starts happening again and one of the things that's fascinating about impostor syndrome in the sense is that like you get dropped in these new situations and you start feeling it again and you have even more experiences right you're even you're even better now you have more skills and more experiences and you start getting pulled out of your comfort zone and at the first sight of like hey this is kind of challenging like like I don't have this exact skill but you have all the other supporting skills and experiences you start to second guess yourself and when we think about comparisons like one of the thing if you read about imposter syndrome or you watch videos on it and stuff you'll find and this I think this is I'm going to say super cool but I don't mean in like a good way I think like fascinating and interesting the the more successful you be come the more like impostor syndrome scenarios you encounter and again when I was chatting with Julia about this in our video interview earlier this week one of the things that came up was this idea of like you have as you become more and more successful you have fewer people to compare yourself against and they are also like as amazing as you but in different things so they seem so much more amazing when they have things that stand out that you don't have and you start to go I don't have that am I worth being here so yeah like you know and I see in the chat from twitch thanks bad cop I feel the same way and I'm not a junior right like you don't need to be a junior so the question was like you know do you think Junior's experience it more than seniors maybe maybe but I think it's like maybe it's because it's all of it so new and maybe there is less like self-confidence because you don't have as many experiences right I think that's maybe a way to rationalize that again I don't have stats on this this is my kind of perspective and uh you know my opinion on it from my experience but certainly it's not limited to just Juniors people go through it all throughout their career it keeps coming up so the next part to this question was do you feel that it's lessened or worsened with experience or has it just changed in terms of how it presents and I think the answer is like maybe a bit of both so I think that the more experience you have I kind of want to think I don't know a good way to like represent this I don't think I've done a good job ahead of time trying to like rationalize how I might explain this but like when you experience impostor syndrome I kind of attribute it like fundamentally being a self-esteem self-worth kind of thing you know you're doing the comparisons you're saying I don't think I'm good enough and if you can demonstrate to yourself because when it comes to self-esteem and self-worth it doesn't matter if other people are telling you oh you're so good that might help a little bit but it's brief it's fleeting you need to be able to truly believe it for yourself and if you are a person who has ever suffered with self-confidence issues and maybe like kind of come out of that you've kind of you know worked on yourself to do that you will know that like you have to spend time on yourself to be able to improve that so I think building up these experience is you have more evidence to yourself like hey I know what's up right but what's fascinating about this to me is that that helps in a period And I mean the experience is and skills you accumulate you keep those but when you get pushed into this next phase of like whatever your career or your life is throwing at you you know you're now going hey this is this is New Territory and you kind of go through this phase again where you're like okay like am I they they gave me this project am I able like am I wor worthy of this project and you start doing it again so yeah I think it gets better like experience should help but when you get newer experiences and and new things to kind of live through impostor synd can show its face again so that's this the last part of it was like has it just changed in terms of how it presents and that's why I think the answer is both because I think it comes up again and even though your scenario is different you go oh crap like there's that impostor syndrome feeling again so Maria says there are three things that help me make peace with my lovely impostor Beast I love that okay mindset shift it's not about me it's about the people I serve and a higher value I'm working towards my why yep discomfort equals potential growth I love this when I'm terrified of something I know that's exactly what will bring me growth and I jump without hesitation still feeling uncomfortable always learning I'm going to come back to this one when I go through all of my impostor syndrome list so that's a really cool one I definitely that resonates with me and then tracking small winds daily it creates the habit of noticing the progress made step by step and yeah so one of the questions we'll get to is like you know how how can you work on it and as Maria called out that's actually something that Julia who I interviewed she also said like one of the things that she actively does is kind of like you know making note of these things where it's like you can and this is going to look different for everyone right but like you if you're kind of going through this you could make little notes even every day right like what did you do today that was good like it and like I said it can look different maybe you don't do it every day but having something you can refer back to is tangible evidence so that you're not like oh like you know I'm not worthy I haven't done anything I shouldn't be here I don't belong it's like yeah but you have this list you've been literally building a list and it's a good way to remind yourself so that's one of those techniques where you are the one reinforcing it not someone else like external validation coming in right going back to self-esteem if you're the kind of person who has low self-esteem it doesn't matter like briefly you know your best friend say no no like you're awesome like you have all these good traits right you might go yeah like that feels good feels good but it doesn't fix your self-esteem because as soon as they stop telling you those things you go where like where where is that I need that you need to create it for yourself okay so I think the tracking small Winston can really help let's keep going here though so I love this one what is the opposite to impostor syndrome um okay so I don't know from like a I don't know like a psychological perspective what the opposite is if there truly is something like an opposite but from like a I don't know uh observing the way people interact like on a you know interpersonal kind of level I think there are people that are overly confident and not self-aware is maybe how I would put it so there's um I don't know there's like a a Persona if you will in in soft engineering um so I don't think it has to be this extreme but one of the personas that comes up is like it's called the intelligent jerk uh I'm not going to curse because this is going to YouTube as well um but like you know intelligent and then uh a-hole right like that's another way that people will will call this Persona and it's someone that's very intelligent they're very skilled right but they kind of lack self-awareness and like maybe interpersonal skills and one of the things that happens is that they're very difficult to work with in in theory if you could give them an isolated task and you were like look you don't have to interact with anyone here's everything you need go build it they could deliver something absolutely amazing because they're brilliant but they're very difficult to work with and I think this type like a p a Persona like this is representative of sort of the opposite of impostor syndrome so it's not a self-confidence issue it's quite the opposite with these people overly confident and they do have uh you know a lot of experiences they are very intelligent so you know rightfully so that should be like hey I'm confident in these things but it's overconfidence and not willing to listen to other people not you know willing to collaborate it's kind of like the kind of steamroll conversations and if you're thinking about someone with impostor syndrome some of the the ways that they might interact they might be like well I don't want to speak up about this stuff like you know you're kind of like afraid so I don't know if I can say that that Persona is the exact opposite but I view that is something that looks like the opposite to me um another question here do you think social media has made imposer syndrome worse the answer uh in my opinion is absolutely yes and the reason why is that it comes back to comparisons because what you see on social media is generally people's best and this is not just like for software engineering um think about I think the most obvious one is like Fitness and beauty standards right I'm not going to talk about beauty standards because it's not I don't know not my wheelhouse um I'm I know I'm beautiful but you know I'm not I'm not looking at beauty standards of others but I do I do like bodybuilding a lot and as someone who has been in the gym for you know 20 plus years uh bodybuilding for let's say half that like the the the standards of people's bodies that we see on the internet are like not not okay uh in terms of being representative of year- round uh physiques that people have so if people look like they are a bodybuilder all year round it's not it's just not real and it's not real because it's not healthy to be at body fat percentages that are that low so you are seeing what people want you to see of course they did all the work they want to show you the pictures of them looking their best and they're also trying to sell products and influence you and share information right if for example if someone was you know into fitness and they're selling you things or they're trying to give you information again growing their following if they're showing you not at their best like you're like why would I trust this guy like he doesn't even like he doesn't even have a six-pack and he's trying to give me advice on how to have a sixpack it's like yeah it's not going to be good marketing so then we and I think people can relate to this because people have probably seen on Instagram or magazines and stuff right on Tik Tok you see these people that look absolutely amazing and you start going like why don't I look like that I I have been going to the gym I've going to the gym you know 20 plus years and I don't have a you know six-pack year round and Stu I don't have a sixpack right now by any means I was dieting for a bodybuilding show in February and if I were to lift up my shirt right now like there's no ABS not at all like at that point I had abs and vascularity like nope all gone it's just not like these are different standards so bringing this back to software engineering and not me being maybe a little bit overweight right now is this idea where you have people that are presenting themselves online sharing information you're seeing their best as a software engineering manager and a software engineer like you know I want to be able to demonstrate to my audience hey I know these things right that's what I want to do I want you to know that I am like a person that you can trust with information and if I we're going to get into authenticity in in just a moment but like I want to put my best foot forward you go wow like this guy knows what he's talking about he he seems so smart about this topic like that's the goal because I'm you know I'm trying to grow an audience and that's what I I want to show you so yeah I think that this type of thing makes you compare yourself to others significantly more and you're only getting the best version of these people so it's so much worse for impostor syndrome you're seeing people that are like trying to they haven't even got their first uh their first software engineering job right that's fine like they're on their way and now they're getting onto social media and you're going holy crap like this person's doing so much they're incredible like and wait they don't even have a job yet how am I ever going to get a job like you know I'm not doing a quarter of the things they're doing like you start doing this comparison so I think it makes it significantly worse on social media okay um has imposter syndrome affected your career if so how did you overcome it so okay this is going to be Story Time with Nick um I didn't rehearse this ahead of time but I just told myself when I go to answer this question I'm going to walk through um from high school I'm going to walk you through my entire career up until right now so bear with me because I'm going to have a lot of ums and a as I'm trying to to jog my memory um you know I'm getting a little bit older now I'm going bald I got white in my beard so it doesn't come back as quick but um we'll get there I'm just checking the chat on LinkedIn here before I dive In Too Deep excellent points one of the good ways to improve imposters Sy is to keep learning and brushing your skills it's helps stay onp yeah uh stay on top of the game it serves as a selfcheck there's a lot to learn so I I agree with this and there's a Nuance to this that I want to mention remember the the definition of impostor s from the beginning and for I know folks are coming and going on the stream I can see the numbers go up and down and stuff so um the definition of impostor center from the beginning was that you do have the skills and experiences yet you do not feel that you are worthy despite those right so to the to the point of hey like you know you can help improve your impostor CND by uh keeping learning and brushing up on your skills there's two parts to this and the the part of acquiring new skills and stuff like I I actually do not think that that helps your impostor syndrome and the reason I say that is because you already have a bunch of skills and you have impostor s vot it anyway but what I do think helps about this and this is just my opinion by the way I'm not you know trying to say like hey you're you're wrong like I'm like I'm not a not a scientist or a doctor I'm just a dude right um the the idea about being able to practice and improve upon your skills is a reinforcement with yourself Hey look it's just more opportunities hey look I can do it hey look I can do it so I do think that practicing things it's not that you don't have the skill or your skill isn't good enough because if that were the case you would be an impostor but that's not the case you have the skills but if you can work on them more have more time to work with them it's more opportunity to remind yourself hey look I am doing it so that's that's the Nuance I want to call out again my perspective okay so Story Time with Nick um I'm going to start off it's going to sound a little cocky because in high school I didn't have to worry about school it's going to it's going to take a dramatic turn very shortly but in high school I didn't have to try I got very good marks felt like I didn't ever do homework I just you know people would put course work in front of me and I could do it whatever but that's where it ends so in high school I decided I'm going to go to the university of water for computer engineering I'm going to make the claim that it's the best engineering school in Canada and I'll arm wrestle anyone who disagrees um no but um you know it's it's supposed to be one of the best engineering schools in Canada so I was like awesome this is going to be great thankfully I had the marks from high school it just kind of happened to work that way and if you recall what I said about impostor Cinderman comparisons you can guess what happens next I go to university and I surrounded by people who are seemingly infinitely smarter than me every single person is super smart I went from being like lit I'm not making this up that's why I said it's going to sound cocky I remember it like prom or whatever people would vote for most likely to be whatever um I was voted like I was voted the smartest person or whatever in my graduating grade it was me versus some other guy and I happened to win but I just like I'm not saying that I'm the smartest this is just kind you know small pond kind of thing I go to university and everyone is so much smarter than me instantly I go oh no am I cut out for this should I be here right it's instantly impostor syndrome now there's something that made this a little bit worse and it's prettyy funny and this is on the video interview that I'll put out it's hopefully going to go up this week on Thursday he telling Julia this my name is Nick and in my class at the University of waterly which by the way the way that the the terms work our program worked is the people that you're with you're basically going to be with them for 5 years straight because we have internships and then we all come back at the same time and it's only an oper year where you have some electives and it might change but you are with that class the entire time so the two smartest kids in my class by a million miles complete Geniuses their names were both Nick there was smart Nick one and smart Nick 2 and I was just Nick I I told Julia when we were chatting I'm like there could have been you know like Nick 3 and like I'm not even on the radar I was just Nick right there were the two smartest kids in the class were Nick it felt terrible so I'm going through University feeling like I hate all of this it's so hard I don't like any of it and then I would do my internships and it was a reminder like okay like no you do know how to program you do love this you're kicking butt here but you know you go through a couple of them I had six internships and the I don't know if I felt impost or Cinder like the first internship and I went back to the same company the second time so that might have been okay but you know still kind of feeling it in school for sure the whole time I'm there the third and fourth with the same company and I think in the very beginning I felt some imposter syndrome and this one's really weird because there was no one around to compare myself to this company hired me and I was the only developer and I was an intern but it meant the pressure was on so this is a little different because I didn't have anyone to compare myself to but what did help is when they were saying hey like build this build this now you know after a little bit of time I was like I can deliver on anything they're asking for so I was able to build up this like feeling of hey like I have all these examples and so far so good right like give me the next one I get it done okay like I'm building up the confidence so I was there twice the uh fifth internship I did this one was at a company where I had what was called like an architect role and the architect role at this company was more about like prototyping things so kind of focused on the direction that the architecture of the software might take and that meant we would get to prototype try things out and then basically your prototypes would get taken on by feature teams where they would go kind of do it for real so to speak but you got to help kind of shape the direction that things should go in and in the beginning of this one I felt impostor syndrome um for sure and one of the reasons why is I was doing a lot of desktop development so I was like man like I was I was making like video games and making my own uh user interface Frameworks and stuff and I was like I got you know user interfaces I got this stuff I can I can build my own and I remember being at this company and I was designing um basically software that you would use as a bank to design the ATM screens and my my manager and my my mentor uh both of them were just awesome right so now I can start to compare myself and I'm going oh man like these guys are really good so the the only comparison I have are these two I'm not working with anyone else at the company a very small kind of team around this so that was another example where I had imposter Syndrome again in the beginning and it took me time because I was able to demonstrate again like they would give me Alles kind of have the Imposter syndrome feeling and I would work through it and by the end of it I felt confident right because everything that they had given me I was able to accomplish the final internship I had so now this is the cool thing about going for internship programs I had basically um what one uh one year and uh I can't do math at nine nine months of uh of work before I go to my six internship if I did my math right there something like that yeah and so I I've been building software now since I was 14 this is my like final year of University I've been I can code and I get a job and I'm working on uh iPads I'm making iPad software I'm using a Mac I've never used that what was fascinating about this job is that the founder in the CTO and the like the sort of the head engineer there were all from Nvidia all absolutely brilliant engineers and like I'm going to say like I felt stupid not because they made me feel stupid they were incredible people but like the comparison part I started to like I was making myself feel stupid like these guys are so smart like you know am I I'm working I don't even know how to program it was objective C2 the worst programming language ever made and I was like I'm struggling to learn this language at this point I knew Visual Basic 6 vb.net C I knew Java I knew uh C I knew python I don't I don't I could lost I was counting on one hand I might have recounted but I couldn't learn Objective C it felt so awful and the point that I'm making here is not like hey look at all the things I know it's like I knew I knew five programming languages I don't even know if I I think I said c right I must have because that's that's the best language but I couldn't learn Objective C it took me the entire internship by the end of it I was like I think I got this but I had a lot of impostor syndrome at that job okay that's just internships now first job and it's going to take there's only a couple of impostor syndrome feelings in this one but first job outside of University it's a digital forensics company okay so it's a startup police officer founded it he wrote some software he's like we're we're making this for real now I've left the force we're going to build forensic software and I remember getting the doing the interview they were like super happy with my C skills I was like heck yeah first day on the job okay he knows it's forensics he's a police officer right he's going to help us kind of like go through some of this stuff and I remember like the first meeting we had with the new Engineers that were hired so does anyone can anyone explain NTFS file systems and I remember sitting there going I know I know literally nothing about like any of the operating system stuff any file systems and what was racing through my head was like I just joined a forensic company and I have no idea about how like how these lower level things on computers work and the whole thing we do is recover deleted information I'm like oh no what have I done and this guy was you know a police officer that worked on the force doing digital investigations he' built this software and I'm going oh no and what about these other guys that just started with me they're kind of nodding they're like yeah I've heard about that like I'm kind of like okay they're not experts but like they've heard like they've heard about these things I don't really know what these things are so yeah I had imposter syndrome right at the beginning of that but um I had about eight years at that company where because I was able to work on so many different things uh I was I was fortunate to kind of Dodge the a lot of the impostor syndrome stuff along the way so that was that was really good uh for me at least and not having that feeling um one of the things that was not good about that was it made it kind of like less relatable I don't know if I went so far as being an intelligent jerk I hope not I think that people that I've worked with hopefully wouldn't say that about me but um you know I I didn't feel impostor and for a good chunk of that um there were times especially on the manager side of things because what was unique about that job was that I was an engineering manager very shortly after I was re tired like pretty fresh out of University and so at the time they were calling them team lead roles but I had like multip I had almost 13 people reporting to me at one point and I had like comp view like I was I was an engineering manager but like this company didn't even have like um like senior level Engineers until like years in right so um yeah like it was managing teams and there were flashes of being like that's actually like kind of why I started Dev leader right there was that moment where I was like hey I don't know what I'm doing here no one's ever taught me how to be a manager um so a little bit of imposter syndrome like can I do this but at that point I might argue maybe I was an impostor I was an imposter because I didn't have the management skills yet right I think that's probably fair to say so I had to work on those over the last 12 years then let's go to Microsoft okay so micro I you know get my job at Microsoft uh I'm hired at principal levels an engineering manager and I had at this point I had built tons of digital fenic software I have two patents for digital forensic software I'm waiting on the other two they're filed but I don't I don't know if they're ever going to reach out to me and let me know if they went through um and I haven't checked to see if they're like they're online yet but anyway so I have two potentially four patents and digital forensic software built a lot of desktop applications and I get my job at Microsoft working in deployment for deploying out to hundreds of thousands of machines and data centers across the world guess how much deployment experience I have the correct answer is zero and the point is that like it wasn't required in my role obviously it's a helpful thing to know but the people that hired me had a lot of faith in my abilities to manage teams and my ability to try and be data driven and make sure that I could get the team to Rally behind data to drive decisions so the skills that I needed that they wanted I had I had the experience and the skills but I started to go oh crap like at once I started I'm like how am I ever going to be up to speed like oh was this some mistake like I did tell them like you guys know I don't have deployment experience right like I was I was very transparent about it I'm like yep we hired you because and they hired me because I had different experiences as well they were like you have a lot of startup experience and growing teams like we like that so I'm getting this you know external reinforcement and it's still like H I don't know um and that took a long time that took a long time and again so how many that's uh not incl let's exclude my internships that's at this point that's my ninth year of working in the industry at principal level at Microsoft and I'm having impostor syndrome and the most recent thing I just switched teams at the beginning of this year I moved on from deployment to our our routing team in Office 365 it's all new to me I've been a principal level engineering manager at the beginning of this year would have been like you know 3 and a half years so like almost almost four years now at principal level and you bet I have impostor syndrome you bet I do now fortunately because I've encountered it so many times kind of like what we've been seeing in the chat and stuff like what can you do about it which we're going to get into after I'm done blabbing here in just a sec there are things you can do there are ways you can remind yourself there are ways that you can try to build on yourself confidence and I am someone that suffer or suffered wow that's a not the right word struggled a lot with uh self-confidence self-esteem things like that especially younger or earlier in my life so I know what it's like to try and you know step back and work on that and taking years to kind of feel like I can be you know confident and comfortable with different parts of my life so there's a bunch of those experiences where I can say hey look I'm feeling impostor syndrome like I am in my current role but okay let's remember like you had these other successes you have these lived experiences you should be okay right and it's just this reminder so still still experience it but you know you can keep it at Bay and yeah so Mary says thanks for sharing you're welcome of course and I want to talk about some of this so I'm I'm still going through questions that were submitted to me so this is just a reminder if you have questions like I will absolutely go through them on live stream so do you think there's a cure for it completely um no no I don't I the reason I don't is because I think that if you're susceptible to it in the first place it's probably a lot to do with your personality right I mentioned if you're the kind of person who's had like self-esteem things going on um and I like I'm saying that but I know there's people who probably like I've never had self-esteem issues and I'm feeling impostor syndrome like I get it but I you know I feel like there's this kind of classification of you're you're able to to not feel confident in yourself whether or not you've experienced outside of like you know software engineering or not but I think that if you're the kind of person where it comes up you probably get rid of it for a bit and then once you find yourself in an uncomfortable new situation comes right back up looks different maybe it's not as severe who knows so it's not the exact same thing but it will keep coming back and you have to keep kind of living through these things to remind yourself like you know you are where you are because you are so awesome okay the last part what are your tips for overcoming impostor syndrome any strategies you personally use okay so we kind of talked about one earlier which is tracking wins now personally I don't do this I think that um like I said there was a part of my career there where I think that I I dodged impostor syndrome for a while like after my internships and stuff I think I I dodged it for a while so I don't have a lot of practice personally in that period of my career and by the time I got to Microsoft and like started to experience it again I think I was fortunate that I had a bunch of working at a startup for that long it was like eight people or so when I started there it was like almost 300 when I left I got to see a lot of stuff so a lot of different experiences so I could draw on those things and say like man like I I've worked a lot so when I feel it I can at least reflect on different things so that's help me but for other people you know if you're able to reflect on you know your positive experience is great if you're not maybe you're still kind of building up these experiences which is okay you know you might truly have experience and skill but you're not like you're not like uh they don't feel concrete to you you can't just recall them and like say oh yeah yeah I got that so yeah writing writing down wins I think is a great one um I think my personal opinion on one of the best ways and this is why I wanted to kind of go through my my story time with Nick scenario there I think one of the best ways to to help with imposter syndrome is to share it and and I say that because every single time I hear about people talking about it it makes it reminds me like yeah other people go through this like you know when you have that feeling of hey I'm not alone I think that's really helpful and the other thing is like even me sharing it it's it makes me feel good to to be able to sit here and go yeah like I'm human I go through stuff like this like it's it's fine like I'm still going I'm still trying to you know make improvements that's come and gone in my career I'm still here right and that's you know I mentioned authenticity briefly earlier I said I want to be able to present to everyone my best version but truthfully my best version for the audience I want to build is to be authentic and that means that I need to tell you by truths I need to be able to tell you look I feel impostor syndrome there's a lot of stuff I don't know still there's a lot of things that you know keep me up at night and scare me and all that kind of stuff yeah like it's you know we're human so I I want to be authentic with you and I think that it helps other people to hear oh they go through imposter syndrome I can remember people that I look up to with many more years of experience saying yeah here's my experience with impostor syndrome and you go really but you're so good right right you've accomplished so much how do you have impostor syndrome it's cuz we all go through it so I think sharing is a really good one um one thing when I was talking with Julia uh this is not like a it's sort of an initial step it's kind of like the the recognition of it right so if you can acknowledge when these feelings are coming on like hey I'm I'm feeling like an impostor I'm feeling like it's not you know things aren't okay like that self-esteem kind of part starts creeping up when you start feeling that if it's easier said than done for sure but if you can start to at least try and recognize it and catch it right doesn't mean you're fixing it you don't have to take any other action right now but when you start to go oh like oh that doesn't feel good like uh you know I don't feel like I belong here just you know if you can pause and go oh like it's happening right if you can start doing that you can start to identify some things that trigger it and I think at least having awareness around it gives you at minimum an opportunity to at least start to reframe things or at least start to maybe try and work on different behaviors right so you might be going oh man like I don't think I like I belong here whatever like uh and then you go wait wait wait like why am I thinking that and you go well I was just reading someone's you know their code review and like holy crap like they know so much more than me and like you go oh wait I was comparing myself to them like I I made myself feel lesser and I think just this awareness of what's Happening can help a lot and you go okay well maybe I do need to go write something down today about a small win like you know just it's little things like this because impostor syndrome isn't something where you just like snap your fingers and it's gone and I think for people that overcome it and they're like I didn't have to do anything I'm like you you probably did it probably took you some time and you were practicing some things that you weren't really being aware of but like you had to build up your self-confidence until it just went away magically right but something happened uh inspiring stories accepting that no one knows everything and remembering that everything can be learned yep avoiding comparisons with others may also help to some degree to not experience the Imposter syndrome having attitude that everything is figureoutable it's a good word and and being curious to know may help with this yeah right it's I don't want to sit here and tell people like oh here's a cure for impostor syndrome because it's coming back like there are things you can do to get you through the current vout of impostor syndrome but it is unfortunately I hate to say it it's very likely coming back but that's okay because I think Maria said something really good earlier on the LinkedIn chat which was I'm going to scroll back up so I can read the direct quote right discomfort equals potential growth when I'm terrified of something I know that's exactly what will bring me growth and I jump without hesitation still feeling uncomfortable always keep learning so I I wanted to come back to this kind of at the end of the impostor syndrum portion of this talk because in my entire I've written posts and stuff about this but in my entire career and like based on my personality I'm very like conservative I get I get terrified of taking risks terrified and if I think back about all of these situations where I was kind of forced into something uncomfortable and I'm like oh no like here we go like I'm not ready for this I'm scared every single one of them was an enormous growth opportunity that digital forensics company when I was like oh crap I don't know anything about digital forensics I went on to go you know almost by myself rewrite one of their applications that was there in the very beginning I sort of uh I want to say like I founded the mobile digital forensics part with you know with a colleague in that company I hadn't done mobile digital forensics before I pioneered there the cloud acquisition with other people on my team so being able to get data from you know Cloud sources and bring it in I built by hand the remote data capture for digital forensics like all of those things I would not have done if it weren't for putting myself into this ridiculously uncomfortable position right my latest ridiculously uncomfortable position is I joined a team at Microsoft that does routing serving trillions of requests per day and I have never worked on any software that does routing so this is my next growth opportunity this one came up for me and I wasn't yet ready to go look and the opportunity came up and this is the first time in my life to what Maria said jump without hesitation I remember having this conversation and going it would be stupid for me to say no to this opportunity that was it I knew that this was going to be a growth opportunity it's the first one in my life where I was like I'll go do it without hesitation every other time you bet there's a lot of hesitation so that's imposter syndrome I'm just doing another chat there's a uh a question from YouTube uh I it's not imposter syndrome related so I'll answer this one from uh I don't know if I'm going to get your name right uh an anush uh so I'll answer that on from YouTube If there's other questions and stuff about imposters in or anything else let me know um I'll kind of uh I'll wrap up the stream once these questions and stuff are done so I'm happy to if you guys keep having questions I'll stay here and answer them so um hey can you tell me I'm a beginner in this field so can you tell me how I can progress in my career yeah so this question will need a lot more um sort of context so that I can give you a better answer because I don't know how much of a beginner like I don't know if you have started programming I don't so feel free keep adding more context right like uh I don't know if you've got your first job if you're trying to even decide to get into to software engineering anything like that but the more context that you can offer with your questions the better I can try and help you um if you just want super super general advice to start on this kind of thing uh the number one thing that I would recommend is uh you're not going to pick the best programming language because it doesn't exist so don't worry about that don't get paralyzed trying to wait for the best language or the best text stack just you want to figure out if you like programming and software engineering you have to start building things so I would recommend thinking about the types of things that seem interesting to you and you may guess wrong you may hate building them there might be something else that's interesting to build and that's okay because you can always switch but you want to start with something and I would recommend you pick something that seems interesting to you because when it comes to learning stuff if you're like fighting it and wanting to resist it you're probably going to give up because you're like why am I doing this I hate it and even if you don't give up like it's good like you're persevering good job but you're it you're probably not going to enjoy it if you pick something you're not interested in and it's going to make it such that the material feels much harder to learn so I do recommend for example if you're like I think it would be really cool to go build a mobile application absolutely start there like that's it just go start and you go online and search like what you know what programming languages can you use if you want to go build on and Android or iOS or maybe you're let you see crossplatform and you're like I don't know what that even means but it seems cool like what do I use start somewhere right start building things you need to be making mistakes so that's the other thing if if if you want the the only shortcut that there is in software engineering and this applies to other things as well where you need to uh spend time on things the only shortcut is recognizing there's no shortcuts and just starting to put in the work as soon as you can because you need to put in the Reps it's a it's a gym analogy but hopefully you get it you need to put in the repetitions to be able to practice because that's the only way that you build the Mastery and the expertise unfortunately unfortunately all of us that have more time in the industry we could tell you all of the things that we messed up on right but it seems like we all need to learn the hard way and there's nothing wrong with that because you genuinely learn things as you're failing right you try it you mess up that's okay you figure out the right way to do it try again cool that's progress that's learning so that's some advice I have for you but you're going to want to just get started try not to get paralyzed like you know if you're going around asking places hey what's the best programming l which you're going to get a million answers the only right answer is CP no I'm kidding but um like I said you want to start in something that I think is interesting to you I've been hearing and reading about the skill Gap presenting in junior devs these days can you speak to what makes a solid foundation for a frontend Dev this is one of the things I probably have the absolute least experience in so uh this is from Neon Genesis Revelations I apologize if I can't answer this properly or adequately um so I think like statistically and this is I was you know having a couple conversations about this there's there's a lot of people getting into software engineering starting and front end development right and there's a handful of reasons why this is the case one is like there's many places that need front-end developers so like there's a there's a demand for that kind of thing the other thing is that when it comes to frontend development you have a feedback loop that's like I make a change I see a thing it's very satisfying sounds kind of funny but when it comes to learning things you're like I do this I get result when it comes to backend stuff you're like you're compiling stuff and you're like cool like I'm stepping through the debugger and I see it working and like oh cool there's a record in a database but like there's there's no visual feedback so for some people it's just less appealing so I think that getting started in front-end stuff plus you got a lot of boot camps that are doing that I think there's a lot of frontend developers that are coming into the industry and again nothing nothing wrong with that but reading about a skill Gap presenting in junior devs these days so I guess the question is what's the solid foundation for frontend Dev um this is going to it's I mean if you want like a specific framework and stuff that kind of goes back to what I was saying just before this like I don't think there's any single right answer but um you know there's like react and JavaScript or and typescript I think if you if you have that kind of under your belt in the in the beginning you're pretty good to rock and roll but I would say like going back to my comment about there's a lot of people you know coming into the industry with those those skills cuz there's so many people doing it I think that what can help a lot um You probably heard people talk about like a or maybe not uh so I shouldn't assume anything but there's this concept of like being t-shaped the letter T right capital T so when you're t-shaped you try to build expertise in an area so that's the depth of expertise that's the The Tall part of your te the vertical stick of the te and the other part of the te the horizontal part is your breadth of skill and I think personally if you are you know starting off and your your te is going to be small in the beginning and that's okay but when you're building your expertise in the front end I think there's sort of like this Baseline set of you know call them programming languages and stacks that you're going to want to work with there's going to be companies that don't even care about react and JavaScript they'll pick something else right um you know I I I can't comment on those things because I'm not every company but I think react and JavaScript and typescript is a great place to start but if you think about being t-shaped that's building out your vertical part of the T you could you know start to differentiate by doing or at least thinking about some full stat Concepts right so you're building the front end what's going to be on the other end of that I'm not saying like if you want focus on front that's that's great I'm not saying right or wrong here but if you want to start differentiating I think at a minimum if you start going hey look someone's clicking this it's making a web request what does it look like in the system when this web request is made if you can start thinking about these other parts and if you spend time building them too even better but I think that can really help build out an understanding of what the heck is going on in software cuz these systems can get pretty complex and then you can still Focus your time on the things you want to do if you want to focus on building front ends but I think having a bit of a understanding at least of what's going on behind the scenes can be beneficial doesn't mean you have to be a master at SQL queries and stuff but like you know having an understanding of like a request lifetime hitting a database where is the caching happening you know are we are we doing multiple queries and aggregating the data not cashing it how many round trips I think if you start to build up that kind of stuff that can be very helpful even if you only want to focus on front end so um I hope I hope that helps my my experiences are not not in front end development so copy that m is the direction I'm going and the T example is a good one cool I'm glad that resonated I've also heard jack of all trades master of one yeah yeah cuz you'll hear like uh you know master of none kind of things but yeah the reality is for the t-shape example it becomes like that right so to give you an example for myself uh when I was doing a lot more softw like I don't program at work anymore but what it used to be was like uh basically anything in Wind forms that sucks to say out loud now man okay U yeah it used to be like anything in Wind forms and then you know at work we were transitioning over to WPF and I was trying to build all my own stuff in WPF so I be became like an expert in WPF so this is again desktop development this is the c frontend tech um but I like I hadn't done any asp.net at all at that point I was very much like t-shaped super into WPF and that's you know kind of where I was at and then you building out breadth and really like not even much in other programming languages like I really stick to C um almost to to a fault now right because I will there's situations where I'm like ah yeah another language might be better for that but like I could probably do it in C so yeah you know I hope the yeah the t-shape example I hope helps I'm not even positive I want to end up going the front end but as you said the feedback was important for me to get started cool yeah I mean got to try it you got to try it right you might try it and go this sucks you might love it but you literally do not know until you try um and I would say if you're like hey this sucks don't give up on software development right you may find that there's something else that really gets your interest in software engineering um biggest piece of advice there that I could say is like so and this is this part's going to be kind of hard too because you don't get a chance if you're working by yourself but you do need to be working with other people so please don't get into software engineering if you think hey look I never have to work with other people this is perfect for me um if I don't know if Maria is still on the the live stream but you will find out very quickly you will be working with other people so if you hate working with other people you know spoiler alert you will be but problem solving I think is another one uh hopefully you love problem solving because a lot of the time you know that's what it's going to come down to so you know analysis pros and cons problem solving and then communicate ating these things with different stakeholders whether that's other software Engineers your manager uh other teams project and product managers customers depending on where you're working uh lots of communication involved though so if uh if you try out the front and stuff and that's not really Landing for you keep those other things I said in mind because if you're like hey like that that sounds interesting I like problem solving I like doing analysis uh I'm okay to go talk with other people uh or that's a skill you you're willing to work on you know it could still be for you and Maria is on LinkedIn I know the chat's not going into the uh into the video fee but that's true communication will be there for sure so there you go uh Maria is a coach for communication for software Engineers so she knows a thing or two about that coming up so there you have it okay folks uh I don't see any other questions I will uh kind of do a bit of a sign off here but if uh if there's any as I'm signing off if you jump in with any other last minute questions I'm happy to answer um but yeah thank you so much um usually what I try to do at the end of these and I'm I should I need to get better at this I got to do a little bit of like self-promotion and advertising and stuff right so um I'm going to switch over to hopefully this works um can I put my can I put my camera on here so you can see oh see look I'm in the corner um I do have courses on C available on dome train so if you do if you want to get started in C you're interested in this kind of thing absolutely please head over to dome train uh this getting started one you don't have to have any programming experience whatsoever so you can get started with that the Deep dive one Builds on that together these are 11 hours and if you want you can go get the bundle it's discounted but the bundle has both both discounted 20% um I never promise that you know you're not going to be an expert by the time you finish my course I think that would be false advertising you will be able to build C applications and even in my courses I recommend to people you should be building software so follow along program alongside don't just watch oh and my video is gone forever now it's never coming back one more time don't fail me now there it is okay cool awesome okay thanks folks I appreciate it I will be live streaming again next Monday I'm going to try to get another stream where I'm coding stuff as well so um I don't have that scheduled yet but that might be a little bit ad hoc so we'll see but thank you so much uh and yeah hopefully you can